What Are You Reading

[Harp]

Rat Pack Confidential by Shawn Levy... I might read this book next, I don't know yet...the murder of the Tzar and family haunts me still...very much.

I recall a pretty Sheila who once advised a Yank depressed over Memorial Day to "snap out of it"...

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a good book to lift your spirits.

 

[HadleyH]

^^^^^^^^^^



[video=youtube;0x-fkSYDtUY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x-fkSYDtUY[/video]

 

[avedwards]

I seem to be reading a lot of non-fiction lately. Currently I'm trying to work on two books at the same time which cover a similar theme:
- The Defence of the Realm - The Authorised History of MI5 (published on MI5's Centenary in 2009)
- Next Stop Execution - The Autobiography of Oleg Gordiefsky

I'm already thinking ahead to what I might read next on my rapidly growing reading list, as I spend so much time travelling at the moment that I finish books quite quickly.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Enough with the serious stuff, I'm now laughing myself sick with "Sob Ballads," by Clarence H. Knapp -- a 1930 collection of outrageous parodies of 1890s tear-jerkers, taken from pieces originally published in the New Yorker. The lachrymose tragic ballad was a "Gay Nineties" cliche even while the 1890s were still going on, but Knapp's versions go beyond simple parody into sublime comic poetry. My favorite so far is "Let Me Play In The Ash Pit, Mother."

 

[cw3pa]

Finished "The Case of the Velvet Claws" by Erle Stanley Gardner. If I've got it right, it's the first Perry Mason mystery. Published in 1933. Raymond Burr fits Perry Mason's description to a "T". William Hopper as Paul Drake not so much, and Della Street appears to be more than just a secretary.

 

[Alex Oviatt]

Re-read of Jessica Mitford's "Hons and Rebels"

 

[Stray Cat]

Enough with the serious stuff

Indeed. :nod:
I've recently finished reading a fluff called "Hitler's violin" - action packed triller with a hint of history, written by a former Israeli fighter pilot who became a famous violinist, Igal Shamir, born in 1938 in Tel Aviv – in Palestine, as the cover points out – in a family of Polish origin.

Now, I'm back to Umberto Eco, and the book is called: "The Prague Cemetery".

 

[Harp]

Enough with the serious stuff

Indeed. :nod:

Beijing Flings; Dating Disasters of a Brit Babe in China, literary review featured in Women of China magazine February 2014

...sounds like a Beijing Bridget Jones' Diary. Not that I am ever going to read this you know....

 

[Miss Golightly]

The Last of Chéri by Colette

 

[DNO]

The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

Eisenhower, Soldier and President by Stephen E. Ambrose
Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist by Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler
Prayer by Philip Kerr

 

[rocketeer]

Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.
I have never read an Ernest Hemingway novel, I thought I would start with this as I am interested in modern Spanish history. I do find it hard going due to his long paragraphs, sometimes over a page in length. It's a great book, being almost a manual about bull fighting.
Are Hemingway's novels in the same style?

 

[1mach1]

The Reivers by Faulkner

 

[Harp]

Hemmingway's Death in the Afternoon.

Are Hemmingway's novels in the same style?

Hemingway characterized his writing as "a simple declarative sentence style;" although he himself was much more complex.
The Sun Also Rises is arguably his best novel.
________________

Revisiting Frans Osinga's Science, Strategy, and War; The Strategic Theory of John Boyd.

 

[dh66]

Not so much simple, but definitely declarative. I was thoroughly engrossed by Death in the Afternoon, although I'll admit that at times it was like reading a really long encyclopedia article on the subject.

Sent from my XT1030 using Tapatalk

 

[rocketeer]

Not so much simple, but definitely declarative. I was thoroughly engrossed by Death in the Afternoon, although I'll admit that at times it was like reading a really long encyclopedia article on the subject.

Sent from my XT1030 using Tapatalk

100% agree. Though I am certainly not a fan of bullfighting this book makes me understand the formalities much more and also an insight into Spanish culture despite the fact that the book was written pre-civil war.

 

[DNO]

This thread seems to have become a bit dormant!

Amongst others, I've just started Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death.

 

[Touchofevil]

Karl Edward Wagner's Darkness Weaves. It has been many many years since I last read anything by the man so I figured why not.

 

[Renault]

"Scouting On Two Continents" by Major Frederick Russell Burnham.

"On The Border With Crook" by John Bourke.

 

[VintageBee]

My yearly re-reading of, "The Shell Seekers". I love that book!